Texas town officials attack a homeless support nonprofit
By: Conner Drigotas
A sham council
On May 23, 2024, the Mayor of Longview Texas, Kristen Ishihara, took to the City Council microphone and proposed “Action Item A,” a new law banning sleeping outside on private property.
Ishihara told those in attendance that she personally asked the City Council to take up the action item, taking responsibility for its inception.
“We have no intention of targeting a particular nonprofit,” she said, “but all the citizen comments have indicated that we are talking about One Love, who had individuals sleeping on their porch.”
One Love Longview, a multi-service nonprofit providing “meals, showers, refuge, healthcare, and more” to people in need, allowed homeless individuals to use their privately owned porch as a safe haven for sleep outside of One Love’s business hours.
A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to Longview city government asking for record of “all the citizen comments” yielded a single email from a local business owner located more than a mile away from Longview’s facility, and this note with no attributed author:
Left to right: Derrick Conley (District 1), Wray Wade (District 3), Shannon Moore (District 2), Kristen Ishihara (Mayor), John Nustad (District 4),Steve Pirtle (District 6), Michelle Gamboa (District 5) https://www.longviewtexas.gov/2198/City-Council
Despite Ishihara’s statement that Action Item A did not have a particular target, the Council openly discussed how the new law would only impact One Love Longview. Mayor Ishihara went as far as to say that her proposal had been built to achieve that exact end:
“What I’ve asked to be brought forward tonight for discussion and consideration on behalf of the council is what I believe is tailored narrowly enough to apply to that situation, which would eliminate the ability to sleep, camp essentially, on private property,” she said.
Sitting among the public in attendance was Amanda Veasy, the founder of One Love Longview and a dedicated provider of services to the homeless community. “It’s the reason I was born, my life's work, to be with this population,” she told Respect America in an interview. “My staff, my volunteers, we spend more time at work than we do at home… [Action Item A] was a personal stab.”
“Action Item A” was just the latest move in what Amanda says was a prolonged campaign by local officials and well connected community members to target her nonprofit - an effort that would eventually erode their financial health and force them to cease operating at their facility on McCann Road.
“The Worst of the Worst”
Gregg County, TX has a population of around 124,000 people, roughly 83,000 of them live in the City of Longview. Official estimates say that Gregg County has 197 homeless people, but Amanda says One Love served more than 1,000 individuals last year, and that the real number of homeless people in the area is orders of magnitude higher than official “snapshot” estimates.
The clear need for services was the reason Amanda started One Love in the first place. The organization was launched in 2020 to augment the services offered by the city and other providers, and she credits city officials for their initial support of the new resource. Amanda says that Mayor Ishihara, then a city council member, even helped draft the paperwork to launch One Love. Amanda once considered Ishihara a friend and worked on her campaigns.
Now, though, Amanda says that friends of One Love are hard to come by. Shortly after the organization moved into a new location on McCann Road, just north of Route 80, business owners around her started complaining.
Doug McKinney is the president of Jack’s Air Conditioning & Heating Inc, which is just 0.2 miles south of One Love. In a body cam video from March 7, 2024, McKinney can be heard telling police officers “I don’t want to look at that crap” and asking “do you want this crap in your city?” as he pressures police to remove individuals from One Love’s Property. “We can’t let them win.”
“I don’t want them there either,” the officer responds. “We’ll have the last laugh,” another officer chimes in.
Amanda alleges that the city of Longview is home to an intermingling of politics and friendship that steps over a line. City Council member Steve Pirtle (District 6) is also featured in the body cam video. He is the one who called police as an advocate for McKinney, and tells officers to “run off the transients that are sleeping on the front porch at this location.” He calls the One Love service recipients, “the worst of the worst.”
Pirtle also addressed the controversy surrounding his direct involvement against One Love in the May 23 meeting, saying, “I still stand behind what I said on that tape” and restated his belief that One Love clients were “the worst of the worst.”
Is this a respectful way for public officials to discuss their constituents?
Arrested for Existing
Clashes with local officials extend beyond debate in city council meetings, and evidence suggests that local police have devoted an unusual amount of resources to harassing One Love service recipients. Amanda says this is particularly problematic as the people her organization has served lack any other option.
“One of the persons who got up and spoke [at the May meeting] was sleeping on my porch because she was not eligible to stay at a local shelter because she had active cancer and had a colostomy bag” Amanda shared, “they could not take her because she was too much of a liability to allow her to sleep there.”
The data also seems to back up Amanda’s complaint of a targeted campaign and escalated punitive measures.
According to police records compiled by nonprofit You Are The Power, between February 23, 2024, and May 24, 2024, Longview police officers arrested One Love clients 80 times. Their crimes included Biking on the Sidewalk, Walking on the Wrong Side of the Road, Walking Against Traffic, Failure to Use a Crosswalk, Camping/Sleeping, Jaywalking, and Riding a Bicycle on the Wrong Side of the Road.
Most recently, on February 9, 2025, Sergeant Chip Koepke of the Longview police pepper sprayed and arrested a service recipient on One Love’s property. The use of force happened just 20 seconds after Koepke pulled into the One Love parking lot. According to the linked facebook post, official records regarding when the use of force occurred were incorrectly documented, no deescalation tactics were used, and the documents that have been made available via FOIA request are heavily redacted.
Sgt. Koepke resigned from the Longview Police Department just a few days later. He appears to be eligible to receive his full pension at taxpayer expense.
Without a home
The campaign against One Love has been successful, insofar as undermining a local service, shifting the service costs to an involuntary model, and harassing homeless people can be considered a success.
As city officials continued to pressure One Love employees and service recipients, allegations of a multi-faceted retaliation campaign have also surfaced.
In one case, Lesha Kidd-Brooks, who had served as Longview’s health manager for 12 years, was forced to resign after issuing One Love a food permit. Though city officials say the resignation followed “communication with both her supervisors and her staff,” about her choice to issue the food permit, Kidd-Brooks disputes this being the truth. In an interview with Respect America, Amanda also noted that Kidd-Brooks was offered resignation or termination shortly after granting One Love a food permit, and that their food permit was revoked on the same day Kidd-Brooks was forced to resign.
In a separate incident, Amanda says a local real estate agent did a collection of items to support One Love and then received threatening calls to “stay away and not support [One Love]” She says this has happened to other donors as well, leading some to withdraw public or financial support.
One Love does not take state or federal grant money both because it is money taken from others involuntarily, and because government money has strings attached that would limit their ability to provide compassionate care and needed resources.
“I think it's such a tragedy that we could pretend that our government wants to do the right thing,” she says, “They give you money, and it's not really giving you money, it's this trade off of: we give you this money, and then we get to tell you how you can help people, and that I cannot wrap my brain around. You don't get to tell people how they can help other people. You’re not there! That is all a problem.”
All of this, the permit barriers, police interference, and barrage of legal action, amounts to an opportunity for government officials to impose new costs on the Longview community.
At the May meeting, Council members and the mayor pledged taxpayer revenue to create a new program doing the same work One Love had been doing since opening, shifting the source of help from a voluntary organization to a new involuntary cost center.
“I have no intention of stopping any of our nonprofits from servicing our homeless population,” Mayor Ishihara stated before asking for a motion on Action Item A.
The ban passed, 4-2, and One Love was legally prohibited from providing services to Longview’s homeless population.
Instead, Councilman Steve “worst of the worst” Pirtle will have a role in deciding what help these people receive.
Financial woes have since forced One Love to give up their McCann Road rental property. As Amanda and her team have been packing up the space, preparing to instead offer decentralized services in partnership with various churches, they have maintained their commitment to helping the homeless population that relies on One Love by intentionally violating city ordinances and undertaking a peaceful act of civil disobedience:
“The city still doesn't have an overnight warming center for the folks who are not eligible at the shelters.” She says, “We are now packing up one side of our building and have opened the other side back up. What are we supposed to do, leave humans sitting outside freezing because we need to pack? I could not wrap my mind around doing that.”
